Picture to Burn

Good morning, Constant Reader! It’s my official release day for my latest Todd Gregory tome, Wicked Frat Boy Ways, which I am kind of excited about. For one thing, I love the cover. For another, I am kind of proud of this book. I did something completely different than anything I’ve ever done before, and it’s also an homage to one of my favorite stories of all time: Les Liaisons Dangereuses. (I’ve also discovered that young people will just look at me blankly when I mention that; or even say Dangerous Liaisons, the award winning film with Glenn Close and John Malkovich from the late 1980’s; however, mention Cruel Intentions with Ryan Phillippe and Sara Michelle Gellar, and their eyes will light up.) It’s a wonderful story; after all, to date, there are four film versions thus far, and a stage version. The Glenn Close movie inspired Madonna’s MTV Video Awards performance of “Vogue”–which I absolutely loved. I am a sucker for the costumes of that era; Bourbon France (1589-1792) is one of my favorite periods of history; the French Revolution is endlessly fascinating to me (Les Liaisons Dangereuses was set in the early 1780’s, and there are those who call the at-the-time scandalous novel as one of the flagstones in the pathway to the French Revolution, by pointing out the corruption and evil behavior that boredom amongst the wealthy and spoiled aristocracy in France to a wider audience); and so my personal favorite film version of the story are the Glenn Close with the Annette Bening/Colin Firth Valmont coming in second. But Cruel Intentions is also very well done, and both Phillippe and Gellar inhabit the evil characters absolutely perfectly. I’ve always wanted to do my own version of the story; but I wanted to follow the novel (which I absolutely loved, and have reread several times) more so than the film.

I’ve played with the idea a lot over the years; the trick is that the novel is epistolary. The epistolary novel was very popular in previous centuries (Dracula is also epistolary for the most part; a mix of letters and diary entries), although it has fallen out of favor in modern times. I’ve always thought they were great; it was a way to get inside character heads much more so than just alternating third-person point of views, and it’s even harder to do alternating first person point of views–which I also didn’t know how to do, and was afraid to try (Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying is perhaps the best example of this ever published). I thought about doing it in the form of emails years ago, and then. after Bold Strokes agreed to publish it, tried to figure out how to do it with modern technology–a combination of texts messages, emails, Facebook posts, etc. But that would also be a formatting nightmare for the technical side of publishing;  I even asked the formatter how it could be done, and the response wasn’t encouraging.

And then I reread one of my favorite books, The Rules of Attraction by Bret Easton Ellis, and I saw how it could be done–alternating first person point of view, present tense; in other words, tell the story in the present from the point of view of characters as it is happening to them, so you can also see, as in the letters, how their perspectives change and how the manipulations happen, and how they really feel. Yes, it was similar to how Faulkner wrote As I Lay Dying, but at the same time, it was a challenge I wanted to take on: an erotic novel with a strong plot, told in the present tense, in alternating first person point of view.

Instead of using the same Beta Kappa chapter at CSU-Polk, I moved it to another campus; one that is more rich and more elite: the University of California at San Felice (a shout out to Margaret Millar, who used San Felice in some of her novels as a stand-in for Santa Barbara), on the California coast a few hours north of Los Angeles. I had the character of Brandon Benson, from Games Frat Boys Play, transfer and now he’s a senior, friends with Phil Connors, chapter president. Phil and Brandon are the primary characters in the story; the others the chess pieces they move around the board; Ricky Monterro is the nephew of a very wealthy self-made lawyer who is president of the alumni association, and a recent drop out from the seminary at Notre Dame who’s just realized he doesn’t want to be a priest, preferring to live openly and honestly as a gay man; Dylan, an incoming transfer from UCLA who is engaged to a soldier on a tour in the Middle East; and Kenny, a shy young gay virgin with no self-esteem who falls head over heels for Ricky at first sight.

Jordy from Games Frat Boys Play even makes an appearance, having rented a house on Fire Island for the summer, which is where Brandon and Dylan first run into each other.

Damn, this book was fun to write. Hope it’s as fun to read!

Wicked Frat Boy Ways_final

 

Blank Space

It always feels good to finish a project. It’s not entirely in the books yet, of course–there’s another round of edits, and then page proofs to get through–but this stage is completed and it feels lovely.  Ironically, it didn’t take nearly as long as I thought it would; I’d started working on it Friday night, and had gotten much further along in it than I’d remembered. I then repaired to my easy chair and read some more of About the Author, which is terrific; a really great noir I can’t wait to finish. I did have to put it aside, though, because it reached that point I always call the “uh-oh” moment; the part where the character makes the really bad decision that will eventually bring him down. It’s an extremely well put-together novel, structurally speaking, which gives me some ideas about a noir I want to write–the long-thought about Muscles.

Reading is such a lovely gift to one’s self, really. I am so glad I learned to read very young, and fell in love with it. It’s a terrific pleasure.

Last night, TCM aired the old Lana Turner movie Imitation of Life, directed by Douglas Sirk, and I watched it for the first time, while paging through Sam Staggs’ gossipy book about it, Born to Be Hurt: The Untold Story of “Imitation of Life.” I love Staggs’ books; I’d already read both All About ‘All About Eve’, Close-up on Sunset Boulevard, and When Blanche Met Brando. They’re wonderful books about the stories behind the making of iconic films–including gossip, of course–and also wittily written and compulsively readable. I do want to read the others again; I recently bought a bunch of them in a lot on eBay  just for that purpose. This one also includes information around the notorious Johnny Stompanato murder–he was Lana’s abusive lover; one night he was threatening her and he was stabbed by her daughter, Cheryl Crane–and it was after this scandal that Lana was cast in Imitation of Life. The movie itself works on so many levels; it’s campy but self-aware, and everyone plays it straight, which makes it even better. Turner plays Lora, an aspiring actress with a young daughter, whose life becomes entwined with that of Annie and her daughter, Sarah Jane–Annie is black and the two come to live with Lora and her daughter Susie, who is about the same age. Lora of course becomes a huge star, and the drama surrounding her has to do with her own self-absorption and basically she allows Annie to raise Susie–but it’s the story of Annie and her light-skinned daughter–who hates being black and passes for white, abandoning her mother until of course, at the very end, Annie has died and Sarah Jane comes back too late, that is the real story here. The movie doesn’t face any of the racial issues, they just are–there’s one perfectly horrible scene where Sarah Jane’s boyfriend, who has found out she is black, beats her (played by Troy Donahue) which is about it, really. There’s a sort of sense, at least on my first viewing, that the terrible situation for people of color in the US at the time was taken for granted; but I can only imagine how controversial the movie was at the time of its release. It was an enormous hit, and Juanita Moore and Susan Kohlar, as Annie and Sarah Jane, both got Oscar nominations. The film is flawed, but Turner is actually pretty good in the role (she was always considered a beauty who couldn’t act), but I also couldn’t help thinking how amazing Joan Crawford could have made it–it was the kind of role she or Bette Davis or Olivia de Havilland could have played in the late 1940’s/early 1950’s.

born to be hurt

If you like books about Hollywood, you have to read Sam Staggs’ books. They’re terrific.

So, this week I am getting back to the WIP, and hope to get some good work done on the short stories I’m struggling with. Woo-hoo! But I’m actually looking forward to getting back to the work I had to put aside to work on the edits of this other manuscript. (Keeping up? Sometimes I can’t keep up with what all is going on with me, so I am often curious if people reading this can follow along.) I should make it clear that the manuscript I just revised from editorial notes is one that will be published under a pseudonym; and the one I am now getting back to is neither a Scotty nor a Chanse. I mentioned a few entries ago that I was looking through Mardi Gras Mambo, and I do think I do need to make the time to reread the entire Scotty series as written thus far before trying to get back into writing another one. It’s long overdue, frankly; I’ve not reread the pre-Katrina Scottys in years, and I think, for this next one, it’s kind of necessary. The nice thing is it’s not like I need to read them deeply, I can sort of skim-read, get a sense of the voice and the characters, and the story.

And on that note, it’s back to the spice mines.

Coming Up Close

I wound up taking yesterday off from writing/editing, which really puts me under the gun today. But after working yesterday, getting groceries, and laundry, I was exhausted, and figured I’d get up early this morning and get going on the editing/rewriting. So, of course, I wound up sleeping late–I got almost ten hours of sleep last night, which is extremely unusual for me on any night. But I am not going to argue with it; I clearly needed the rest, right? So, I am going to get this entry finished up as a warm-up, clean up my email inbox as necessary, and then I am going to finish getting the kitchen cleaned up before showering and getting down to business here. I promised that I would get it finished today and turned in, and I am going to make this deadline no matter how badly I would rather curl up in a chair with About the Author, which I am absolutely loving, for many reasons.

I am only on my first cup of coffee right now, and am slowly waking up, which is kind of lovely. The shower will, as always, finish the process. It is a little disturbing how filthy the kitchen has become–out of order and all that. I am thinking about making shrimp creole for dinner, which means making it around two thirty (making the roux; etc.–it takes four hours to cook in the crock pot). I don’t think I’ll have a problem getting the edits/rewrite finished today, either–it really won’t take very long, I have very concise editorial notes and my editor really has a sharp eye for simple, easy ways to make the story and characters stronger, which is lovely. It’s simply a matter of not allowing myself to get distracted by anything, which is harder than it sounds.

At least, it is for me.

While I have been talking about Todd Gregory in the lead up to the release of his (my?) third Frat Boy book this week (its official release is Tuesday, for those of you who are keeping up), I’ve decided to skip over the vampire stories (“Blood on the Moon” and Need) because, while I enjoyed them and am proud of them, they are a different animal (there is a fraternity connection; my main character in both of those was a fraternity boy–Beta Kappa, of course–at Ole Miss) than the Frat Boy books. And while of course my Todd Gregory short story collection, Promises in Every Star and Other Stories, has little to do with either the Frat Boy books or the vampire stories, it’s more of a piece with the Frat Boy books than the vampire stories–although the short story “Bloodletting”, which is also Chapter One of Need, is included in it.

As I often have said, short stories are often more problematic for me than writing novels; so of course, having a short story collection put together has always been a dream of mine–from having enough stories to actually having any interest in such a book from a publisher. And Bold Strokes gave the collection a great cover.

promises in every star

You really can’t go wrong with that cover, can you?

It wasn’t my first short story collection, though. This was:

WannaWrestle-Front

That book happened in late fall, 2004. A publisher approached me and wanted to do a collection of my wrestling stories. I hadn’t published enough stories at that time to make up a full book, so I had to write some new ones, and I did. The book didn’t come out when it was supposed to, I never got paid anything for it, I wasn’t even sure if it was available anywhere–to be honest. The subsidiary rights were sold to Insightoutbooks, and it did very well there–again, I never saw any money because of ‘problems’ with the publisher. In the fall after Katrina, I got an offer from the publisher for a flat cash settlement to return the rights to me, terminate the contract, and get all remaining copies in stock at the warehouse….which ended up being nine copies. I seriously doubt the print run was that small, you know? In other words, I got thoroughly screwed…but at the same time, I wanted the mess over and done with and didn’t have the time nor interest as I was trying to figure out what to do with my life and living situation after the flood, you know? I think you can still find copies of it somewhere on line–for ridiculous amounts of money. I personally only have one copy left. Maybe I should do it as an ebook. It can’t hurt, it’s just sitting there, right?

Anyway, I digress. As I look over the table of contents for Promises in Every Star, I see that only two stories–“Man in a Speedo” and “Will You Love Me in September?”–were the only stories in it to be previously unpublished; I’ve not really written any Todd Gregory short stories since the book came out, which is kind of odd, really. People just stopped asking me to write stories for their anthologies. Not sure why that is, but there you have it.

I love all of these stories–“Promises in Every Star,” “The Sea Where Its Shallow,” “Unsent,” and “Wrought Iron Lace” are particular favorites of mine–and I was terribly pleased to have them all in one book.

I’d love to do another collection of my darker stories–crime and horror–and I think I may have enough published to do one, although I’d probably have to write some new ones (and I do have some unpublished ones on hand) but I might have to do it as a self-published thing. Who knows? We’ll see.

And now, back to the spice mines.

 

Sugar Sugar

So, I finally watched the season finale of Riverdale last night, and I have to say, well done! I went into Riverdale not sure what to expect–and worried I’d be disappointed–but the show really worked on many levels The writing was strong, if a bit uneven at times; the way it was shot–the production values, cinematography, use of color, etc–was always on point; but the biggest strength of the show was the cast. The young actors playing the Gang were appealing and imminently likable; and following the lead of Pretty Little Liars, the older members of the cast were former teen heartthrobs (Jason Gedrick, Luke Perry) or had become successful as young stars (Madchen Amick, Robin Givens). I am really looking forward to the second season.

Well done, Riverdale!

I slept really late this morning, which kind of felt good. I need to finish going over my editorial notes, and making those corrections–I intend to spend tomorrow polishing the book from beginning to end, and I also have to go into the office for a few hours today, as well as make groceries. I’d thought about doing the groceries this morning, but oversleeping took care of that, as well as wiping out my plan to finish the editorial notes. I’ll now have to do that when I get home from the office/making groceries. That’s fine, too; this morning before work I can organize/clean the kitchen and finish the laundry and do all those other lovely chores before running to get the mail and heading in to the office. Hurray! (There really needs to be a sarcasm font.)

I also started reading John Colapinto’s About the Author last night. It was recommended to me by a friend when I told them the basic premise behind my short story “Quiet Desperation”. I am only a few pages in but I am enjoying it so far. When I finish, I think I am going to read either The Sympathizer (won both Pulitzer Prize and Edgar) or Before the Fall by Noah Hawley (recently won the Edgar). Definitely some good reading in my future! Huzzah!

I also, for the first time in a while, looked at Mardi Gras Mambo, aka Scotty Three, and was more than a little startled by how much the tone, how much the character, had changed since then. People change, of course–things that happen affect who you are, affect how you react to things, change your perspective–but in just reading the introduction and the first three chapters, the change was so dramatic it was startling. Should I go back to Scotty–when I go back to Scotty–it only makes sense to read the series over again, from start to finish. Maybe it’s too late to get that sense of the earlier Scotty back now, I don’t know. But some things I’d been feeling make sense now; maybe in rereading the entire series I can figure out how to do the new one.

I have to say, I am starting to enjoy myself again with writing and editing. I think the break from deadlines was precisely what I needed.

And now, back to the spice mines.

Here’s a Saturday hunk for you:

 

456d2da057cb048966f9754624cdcbed

(They Long to Be) Close to You

Laura Lippman famously said on a panel once that in noir fiction, “dreamers become schemers.” It’s probably the best, and most simple, description of noir that I’ve ever heard; it’s broad enough to include James M. Cain’s Mildred Pierce (the book is different from the film) because Mildred does become a schemer, even though there is no crime in the book. That’s the part of noir that most don’t get; there doesn’t really have to be a crime in the story for it to be noir; although most noir has a crime. The first time I ever tried to write noir (which I love) was when I was asked to write a story for New Orleans Noir; that story, “Annunciation Shotgun,” is one of my favorites of my own work, and I was very pleased with my dark, nasty little story. So, you can imagine my horror when one of the other contributors told me, at a reading for the book, how much she loved my story “because it was so funny.” I hadn’t intended it to be funny, of course, but when it became my turn to read, sure enough, the audience laughed in parts. And I learned a valuable lesson: noir can be funny, too.

This is clearly a lesson the Victor Gischler learned at some point in his writing career because his second novel, The Pistol Poets, is noir but at the same time one of the funniest books I’ve ever read.

51CRGXC6VWL._SX302_BO1,204,203,200_

Moses Duncan was in the barn up to his elbows in the fried engine of his Harley-Davidson when he saw the girl driving too fast down the dirt road to his ranch, her Toyota pickup kicking up dust, the dogs barking. He knew who it was. The girl, one of those college kids. Sexy.

He looked at himself. Wiry arms sticking out of his sleeveless AC/DC T-shirt, greasy jeans. It was freezing in the barn, but he couldn’t work on the bike in a jacket. He hadn’t shaved or bathed in two days. Damn, he hated to look so shitty when the pretty ones came around to make a buy. He pushed back his shaggy dishwater hair, accidentally smearing  grease on one side of his head.

He wiped his hands on a rag, stepped out of the barn just as she parked her truck. Moses squinted at the sky. Clouds rolling in. It was rain soon, sleet maybe if it got cold enough.

As Constant Reader is aware, plot is probably my weakest point when it comes to my own novels. I can do character, dialogue, scene, setting, place, mood–all of that. But when it comes to plot…well, I just can’t seem to wrap my mind around how to intricately construct a plot and weave the strands and characters together. Carl Hiassen is really good at this (and manages to be funny at the same time); Victor Gischler does the same thing. And The Pistol Poets manages to contain the same level of farce as Hiassen, while being truly hardboiled and noir at the same time. There are any number of characters in The Pistol Poets, and many of them are point of view characters, at least briefly; again, very hard to pull off and make work.

The book begins with a college student buying drugs from Moses Duncan; she is having an assignation later on with one of her instructors at Eastern Oklahoma University, a second (maybe even third) rate college in a bumfuck small town, a visiting professor and published poet named Jay Morgan. Jay is the erstwhile hero/anti-hero of the story; having a sort of midlife crisis as he moves around the country at bad colleges as a visiting professor, filling in for tenured professors on sabbatical, drowning in alcohol and an “i-don’t-give-a-shit” attitude. The story also involves Harold Jenks, a two-bit hoodlum in East St. Louis who becomes accidentally involved in the murder of a young college student, heading for the bus station to attend the MFA program at EOU. Harold is sick of the life and decides to take the student’s place, which just happens to be in Jay’s poetry seminar…and the story is off to the races. It’s hard to imagine, given the high amount of violence and high body count, that the book is also funny; it manages to skewer MFA writing programs, poetry, academic writing/literature conferences, department politics, drug dealing, and so, so much more. It’s highly, highly entertaining, and I highly recommend this without any qualms.

And now, back to my edits.

All Right Now

Very tired today, but in a good way. Yesterday was a rather long day.

It started early in the morning with Wacky Russian and ended with bar testing late last night.  I had a pretty good workout yesterday. I’ve lost twelve or thirteen pounds since Mardi Gras, depending, and have about thirteen or fourteen more to go before I hit my goal weight of two hundred pounds. I can already see a difference in my face–I have dimples again, and it’s not as easy for my chin to disappear into my neck depending on how I hold/position my head as it used to be, which is lovely. I also can see a reduction in my middle–not quite as much as I would like, but definitely progress–and that’s also fine; it usually goes from everywhere else first anyway, so some progress is inspiring. This has all come about from a change in diet–reducing portions mostly, and not eating anything after eight pm–so if I can ever drag my lazy ass to the gym more than once per week,  I can get there even faster. And I don’t even have to do cardio. I can just do weights. I lost weight the first time (and the second time) without doing cardio at all; just from weight-lifting, so there is that.

Woo-hoo!

As Constant Reader may or may not know, I often struggle with self-image issues, and have all my life (being told, repeatedly, that I was dumb, fat and ugly as a child took its toll), and when I initially started going to gay bars and so forth, I was overweight and always wore my glasses. It was unpleasant, and after being told that I would basically never find anyone because I was fat and ugly (it was much worse than that brief recap, I might add) I decided that I could do something about my body, even if I couldn’t about my face. I transformed, and my life changed so much as a result I became a personal trainer, so I could help other people change their lives–and realize that it’s about being healthy, not being sexy, which was the mistake I made. It’s a story for another time, really, but this made me want to write an Ugly Duckling transformation story, and when Kensington wanted me to do another fratboy book, I said yes–and decided this was the time to do it. As I wrote it, I called it beautiful, but Kensington wisely changed the title to Games Frat Boys Play, to further develop that brand, and it got the same style cover as the original.

games frat boys play cover

I didn’t think it was possible to get a better cover than the original, but I was wrong. I liked this one even more than the first!

I’d kind of wanted to do a Dangerous Liaisons kind of thing with the fraternity boys, but my editor wasn’t keen on that idea, so I went with an ‘ugly duckling’ story. I’ve always been a sucker for a revenge story (not sure what that says about me, frankly), and so I kind of patterned it after an old ABC Movie of the Week, written by Joan Rivers, called The Girl Most Likely To, which was Stockard Channing’s first big role on television or in film. The premise was her character was frumpy, overweight, and unattractive, but incredibly sweet if naive. She was also a genius. So when she went away to college, everyone treated her horribly, humiliation after humiliation, and then she was horribly humiliated in a terribly public way. In tears, she drives away from the campus and is in a terrible car accident, and winds up in a coma. She didn’t have her driver’s license on her, so they reconstructed her face based on her bone structure, and while she was in the coma she lost thirty pounds—so, she came out of the coma beautiful and thin–and unrecognizable. So, she goes back to the campus and gets even with everyone–killing them all in ingenious ways. I loved that story, and wanted to do something similar–but how to transform him in a very short period of time without using a coma?

Hmmmm. Finally, I realized that the only way the character could be naive and shy, or at least for me, to work would be if he had spent most of his life in private boarding schools…which meant he had to be filthy rich. I also decided to bracket the story around a police investigation, starting with a cop coming to talk to my main character at his apartment to find out what happened at the fraternity when someone was injured (possibly fatally; we don’t know that until after the main character finishes telling the cop his story). I created Jordy Valentine, a sweet, nerdy, incredibly smart kid whose father invented accounting software and made hundreds of millions, and sent Jordy to an exclusive, expensive boarding school in Switzerland, where he didn’t fit in and basically kept to himself. Jordy’s decision to attend CSU-Polk rather than Harvard or Yale or any of the other Ivys is because he wants to interact with more normal kids, have a normal college experience at least for a couple of years, and maybe learn how to be better with social interactions.  Jeff and Blair from Every Frat Boy Wants It live in the apartment across the hall from Jordy, and they’re the ones who convince him to rush Beta Kappa. The brothers aren’t particularly interested in Jordy as a pledge until they find out who his father is–and that he is, therefore, swimming in cash. He falls hard for handsome and sexy Chad, the bitchy rush chairman–and the story is off and running.

“This,” reflected police detective Joe Palladino, “is an awfully nice apartment complex for a college student to be living in. How the hell does he afford it?”

The Alhambra Apartments, he knew, started at a mere $1500 per month for a studio and went up–way up–from there. When they’d opened a few years earlier, his then boyfriend, Sean, had wanted to take a look at them. Joe had failed to see the point–there was no way they could afford the rents there, even with their combined incomes–but Sean had insisted, and it was easier to give in then to have an argument. And yes, the place was gorgeous–you had to be let in by security, and there were fountains and tennis courts and swimming pools conveniently placed throughout the complex. Each building had a laundry facility, and near the clubhouse was an on-site dry cleaner. There was even a fully equipped workout facility with state of the art equipment that put Joe’s gym to shame. The apartments themselves were large, full of light, and luxurious–but after the tour, Sean had pouted all night because they couldn’t afford to live there, as though it were somehow Joe’s fault. But everything had always been Joe’s fault, which was why he’d dumped Sean shortly after that. There was, after all, only so much complaining that anyone can put up with. Sean wanted everything but didn’t want to work for it–and Joe eventually tired of being compared to Sean’s previous, much older boyfriend and being found wanting. Sean was young and handsome–and so thought everything should be handed to him. He didn’t like having to work, and he didn’t like that Joe’s income wasn’t enough for him to live a life of luxury and idleness while being supported.

Like I said, the book was a lot of fun to write, and it’s still available as an ebook–and it still sells, all these years later, just like its predecessor.

And now, back to the spice mines.

 

The Long and Winding Road

Hey there, Tuesday! How are you doing? I slept well last night–we watched an interesting documentary called The Imposter before going to bed, which raised more questions than it actually answered, to be honest–and I woke up feeling rested and rarin’ to go this morning. Well, maybe a little over rested, if you know what I mean; I’d rather have fun than get anything done today. But that is NOT an option. Period.

Since my next Todd Gregory opus is dropping next week, I thought I’d start talking a little about the Todd Gregory books, how I came to be Todd Gregory, etc.

I started publishing short stories as Todd in or around 2003, and primarily it was because I’d been doing wrestling erotica under my own name (which is actually kind of a pseudonym itself, but more on that later) and so anthology editors would request wrestling stories from me when they’d invite me to write something for their next project. While I didn’t mind writing wrestling stories, I also wanted to write other things; so I decided if erotica readers expected wrestling stories from Greg Herren, then I would have to use another name to write erotica stories that didn’t involve wrestling. I chose Todd Gregory because it was also, like Greg Herren, part of my actual name: Gregory  Todd Herren. I’ve always gone by Greg; the only person who ever called me ‘Gregory’ was my maternal grandmother, and in her thick Southern accent it came out as “Gregruh”, which I’ve always kind of liked. So, technically, ‘Greg Herren’ is my real name but isn’t my LEGAL name. So, Todd Gregory kind of worked for me, and I think the first story I published under that name was called “The Sea Where It’s Shallow,” which remains one of my favorite stories of my own. And thus, Todd Gregory was born.

Flash forward a few years, and my editor at Kensington asked me if I was willing to write a gay erotic novel set in a fraternity. I had already edited the anthology FRATSEX under my own name, and it was enormously successful– it had actually earned out before it’s official publication date, and continued to be a lucrative source of income for me for years before Alyson chose to stop paying me–and so I said, “sure.” The working title for the book was Fraternity Row, and while it was going to be a gay erotic novel, I wanted to deal with issues of homophobia within fraternities, and the fraternity closet. The name was changed before publication, and let’s face it, you can’t go wrong with this cover:

every frat boy wants it

Every Frat Boy Wants It.

The title kind of bothered me; once you’ve been in a fraternity, you hate the abbreviation ‘frat’ (you wouldn’t call your country a cunt, would you? echoes through my head every time I see it) but I’ve learned to live with it. It’s funny, though, how you get trained…anyway, part of my character Chanse MacLeod’s scarring past included being in a fraternity while he was at LSU, and I used that fraternity again, Beta Kappa (doesn’t exist in real life). I also decided to invent a small city with a college, Polk, California, and California State University-Polk (‘see as you pee’), which were loosely patterned after Fresno and Fresno State.  I decided to make my main character someone who had moved to California from Kansas, much as I had, and I dug back into my files, where I had created characters for a fraternity based novel years ago–Phil Conners, Blair Blanchard, and Kenny Ryan–and decided to use the structure of that story to create this one, only with a gay twist.

As I walk into the locker room of my high school to get my backpack, I’m aware of the sound of the shower running. Even before I walk around the corner that will reveal the row of black lockets and the communal shower area just beyond, I can smell that pungent smell of sweat, dirty clothes, and sour jocks. I would never admit it to anyone, but I love that smell. Especially when it’s warm outside–the smell seems riper, more vital, more alive. For me, it is the smell of athletic boys, the smell of their faded and dirty jockstraps. At night, when I lie in my bed alone jacking off in the quiet darkness, I close my eyes and I try to remember it. I imagine myself in that locker room after practice, the room alive with the sound of laughter and snapping towels, of boys running around in their jocks and giving each other bullshit as they brag about what girls they’ve fucked and how big their dicks are. I try to remember, as I lie there in my bed, the exact shape of their hard white asses, whose jockstrap is twisted just above the start of the curve, and below the muscled tan of their backs. It’s the locker room where I first saw another boy naked, after a;;–the only place where it’s acceptable to see other boys in various states of undress. The locker room always haunts my fantasies and my dreams.

It was fun to write, and it was about how my main character, Jeff Morgan (I ended up creating a new main character) met Blair, who talked him into rushing the house, and how the two of them slowly developed into a relationship; with Jeff having other experiences along the way as he fell in love with Blair, who didn’t seem to want to be in a relationship with him. The book, with all of its lusty sex scenes, was really about falling in love for the first time, as well as becoming comfortable with your own sexuality.

I still get royalties. It was originally published in 2007, and you can still get the print copies from second hand sources, but the ebook is still available and while the book–which I haven’t read in a while–is probably pretty dated now, it’s still selling ten years later.

Which is kind of cool, really.

And now back to the spice mines.

 

The Long and Winding Road

Good morning, Monday, how are you? I am a bit rested and ready to face the challenges of the week ahead. I know, right? Who am I, and what have I done with Greg? Hey, it happens, you know.

I started reading Victor Gischler’s The Pistol Poets yesterday and am enjoying it so far. I also finished reading Royal Renegades, which was about the English Civil Wars and the children of Charles I, and how the wars and the exile affected them. Charles’ wife, Henrietta Maria, really comes across badly, but then from everything I’ve read she was pretty much an awful person. It was interesting and informative to read, but that was one royal family that was ill-fated; so few Stuarts died in their beds, or if they did, with their thrones intact, going back to when they were just the ruling family of Scotland. If you’re interested in English history, I can highly recommend this book; it’s well written and moves along at  quite a good pace. I have now moved on to Anne Somerset’s The Affair of the Poisons: Murder, Satanism, and Infanticide at the Court of Louis XIV. This is a subject that has always fascinated me, but I’ve not read much about other than what appears in French histories or biographies of Louis XIV, and I am really looking forward to sinking my teeth into a book that focuses solely on this story–and I think my next non-fiction will be How to Ruin a Queen, about Marie Antoinette and the Affair of the Diamond Necklace.

I love this kind of stuff.

I have edits to do this week, so it looks like my free time is going to be spent doing rewrites and edits for the rest of the week, all through the weekend, which is fine. I am taking a new approach to rewrites and editing my own work; I am looking at it as an invigorating challenge that will make my work better rather than as an odious chore that I hate doing. I don’t know why that never occurred to me before, really; so much of life depends, as Obi-wan said to Luke, on your point of view. I want to be a better writer, and I want my books to be better, therefore, edits and rewrites are a part of that process to make the work better. I am a good writer, I will never claim not to be, but I am not necessarily as good as I would like to be, and I certainly don’t ever want to get to a point where I can’t improve what I do.

And on that note, back to the spice mines with me.

Here’s a Monday morning hunk for you to get your week started.

swim3

Stay in My Corner

We binged the Netflix series Dear White People last night, and got so involved we couldn’t stop watching; it was one of those shows where you say “oh, just one more won’t hurt” and then it’s over and you’re saying it again and then “well, there’s only ONE left” and then it’s over and you just sit back and think, “wow.” Full realized characters, incredible acting, and the writing? Stellar. Again, it was told from almost everyone’s point of view, so you got to know everyone and their backstories, especially with each other. It was funny, provocative, timely, and diverse. Obviously, my favorite character was the young gay writer, coming to terms with his enormous crush on his hot but straight roommate, trying to figure out who he is while navigating the murky waters of a college campus and institutionalized racism–but no one had an issue with his sexuality. His also gay editor at the independent campus paper got off a line that has me still laughing–and it was repeated by another character in the same episode: “Labels are what keep people in Florida from drinking Windex.”

I finished reading a book yesterday, started a couple more and put them in the donation pile after a couple of chapters, and really was at a loss for what to read next; and finally settled on Victor Gischler’s The Pistol Poets. I did a panel with him years and years ago at the Louisiana Book Festival–really liked him, thought he was smart and funny and engaging–and then read his book Gun Monkeys, which I also enjoyed, and always meant to get more of his books. Sometime last year something reminded me of him, and I finally got some more of them. It has a great opening, and I am looking forward to spending some time with it today, as well as some cleaning, writing, and editing.

The other day, I wrote about the character of Jerry Manning, who appears in Garden District Gothic, and how much I liked the character. I also used him as a character in The Orion Mask–which I had somehow forgotten–and in fact, Jerry is the catalyst for that entire book. I had already created the character of Jerry for the Paige book I’d intended to write, and I liked him so much I actually introduced him to readers in The Orion Mask.

The Orion Mask 300 DPI

I had the idea for that book a long time ago; I’d always loved the romantic suspense novels of Phyllis A. Whitney, Victoria Holt, and Mary Stewart (although I would argue that she wasn’t a romantic suspense writer, simply marketed as one), and of course, Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca is one of my favorite novels of all time. One of the reasons I loved that style of book so much is because they were not only mysteries, but there was a Gothic feel to them, stylistically and mood-wise, and I always wanted to write one. (I had already published what is my personal favorite of all my novels, Timothy, and really wanted to go back to that well again.) I originally came up with the idea for The Orion Mask many years ago; when I came to New Orleans for Mardi Gras the first time in 1995, only in all my notes and so forth it was called The Orpheus Mask;  the driving idea was a murder that happened a long time ago, and rare, valuable Mardi Gras masks had something to do with the crime. After moving to New Orleans and becoming more knowledgeable about the city and its history, I realized the Krewe of Orpheus was actually too new–plus, I couldn’t really use an actual Mardi Gras krewe. I still wanted to do the book, though, just wasn’t sure how to make it all work. I also knew it had to take place outside of New Orleans; for the story to work, the majority of the action needed to occur at a mansion in the countryside.

Fortunately, there are plenty of those. I was already using one for Murder in the Arts District, that was based on a sort of hybrid of Houmas House and Oak Alley, and thought, oh, what the hell, I’ll just use the same place for this book, too. It is fiction, after all. I’d created a fictional parish as well–Redemption Parish–for that first book, and had based a small town near the plantation on Breaux Bridge, just off I-10 between Baton Rouge and Lafayette that I’d visited with some friends from out of town years ago, but the town never really appeared in that story, so I could really use it for this book. But I still didn’t know how to connect the masks in…and then we went to Italy, and while we were there we went to Venice, and you cannot escape the Carnival masks or the Murano glass there. As we walked the cobbled alleys of that remarkably beautiful city (I so want to go back), it hit me in a flash: someone from Venice who worked with the glass came to America, to Louisiana, and the plantation not only was a farm but also produced glass, using the same techniques made famous by the Venetians, and they could have produced masks for the Kings of the major krewes of Mardi Gras made from the glass. I invented my own, now-defunct krewe–the Krewe of Orion–and everything fell into place.

My story, of course, which was about a young man whose mother died when he was very young, and who was raised by his father and stepmother, completely disconnected from his mother’s family and only comes to see them as an adult, which starts the story, didn’t really have the right hook I needed to get started. Why would he suddenly, after all these years, finally get in touch with his mother’s family?

And that’s where Jerry came in. Jerry, looking for another true crime to write another one of his books, has discovered the murder/suicide involving my character’s mother. I named the character Heath Brandon, after a friend of mine, by inverting his first and middle names (I’d actually given a character his actual name before we met; it was very odd because his name was so familiar to me when we met, but we’d never met before, and then one day I realized I had actually written a character with that name, but I digress.). I put Heath into another fictional city I’d created for another book, Bay City (based on Tampa), and had him work at the airport at an airline ticket counter (a job I’ve actually had), working for the fictitious airline I created for Murder in the Rue Dauphine and have always used ever since whenever I need an airline.

I sat up in a strange bed, wide awake, my heart pounding.

 Disoriented, I looked around in the gloom, not sure where I was or what had woken me up from my already restless sleep. I shivered. A storm was raging outside as my mind began the process of clearing out the fog. Wind was whipping around the house, rattling the windows and the French doors.  The rain was coming down in a steady stream. As I sat up further in my bed, lightning lit up the room, and I recoiled in horror. The brief flash of illumination had exposed the shadow of someone against the curtains over the French doors. I bit back a scream as I wondered if there was anything within reach in this strange room that I could use as a weapon. My eyes were still seeing spots as thunder shook the house as I remembered there was a table lamp on the night stand next to the bed. As my vision cleared, I could see through the gloom that the doorknob on the French doors was turning. I reached my hand out to the table and fumbled for the switch on the lamp. I found it and clicked it on, filling the room with bright yellow light.

I thought I heard footsteps running away along the gallery.  I threw the covers aside and climbed out of the massive bed. I dashed over to the fireplace on the other side of the bed, grabbed one of the brass pokers, and carried it over to the French doors. I flipped the lock off, turned the knob , and the wind immediately grabbed them out of my hands. They slammed against the walls and swung back. The wind pushed me back a few steps. Curtains moved away from the walls, and the canopy over the bed rippled as I struggled to latch the doors against the walls. Once this was accomplished, I tried to step out onto the gallery. Lightning flashed again as I stepped out onto the wide gallery. I wrapped my arms around me and wished I’d put on at least a T-shirt. The wind was blowing the rain onto the gallery, and the heavy drops were splashing my legs with water as I looked through the gloom in each direction.

I didn’t see anyone.

My heart still pounding, I closed and locked the doors again before heading back to the bed, still holding the poker in my hand. I put the poker into the bed next to me and slid underneath the covers. Maybe it had been a dream, maybe there really hadn’t been someone out there on the gallery trying to get into my room, and it was just my imagination working overtime. There wasn’t anyone out there, you fool, I scolded myself, you’re just a little off balance—but it’s understandable. It isn’t every day you meet a family you didn’t know you had a month ago. I switched the lamp off and pulled the covers back up to my chin, and lay there, staring at the canopy over my head.

It was hard to believe it had only been a month since I first noticed the bald man sitting in the airport lobby, and my entire life changed.

The bald man was Jerry, of course, and he tracked Heath down as he investigated the long ago murder/suicide, and it was Jerry who set the stage for Heath to come back to the family estate, Chambord, and  find the truth about what had happened all those years ago, about his mother and the Orion mask.

Writing the book was a lot of fun, and I’d love to do another, similar style book at some point.

I had thought about giving Jerry his own series, or his own stand-alone book; and when I started making notes I realized something: he had been a personal trainer/stripper (so had Scotty) and he came from a repressive small town and a white trash family (Chanse), and thus was basically repeating myself, which is one of my biggest fears. So I shelved the idea…but it runs through my mind periodically because the idea is a good one. I may have to write it about a different character, though.

Heavy sigh.

And now, back to the spice mines.

 

Simon Says

Lots to get done today, but I am groggy and struggling to wake up. I have errands to do, editing and writing, and cleaning–always, always, cleaning. I try to be better about keeping up with things around the house during the week but always, inevitably, fail because I am tired by the time I get home. I’d also like to get to the gym today, but the way I feel right now I am not certain that’s going to happen. Heavy heaving sigh.

I slept well, but again, had weird and unsettling dreams, which is why I think I feel so worn out this morning. There’s nothing worse than weird and unsettling dreams, and while I don’t want to discuss the details of this dream, it had to do my career and it wasn’t a good dream by any stretch of the imagination. Isn’t that really the worst? Ugh, I am sure it was based in anxiety, and if you’re wondering, yes, I have been suffering some anxiety about my career lately. (What’s going on in Washington lately hasn’t helped with my anxiety levels, either.) Unfortunately, this anxiety is one of the things that kind of keeps me from getting my work done; I fall into the pit of despair and think what’s the point and why bother? But that is self-defeating, and God knows I set up enough traps and obstacles to succeeding that I don’t need any further help in that regard. So, in a moment I am going to make my third cup of coffee and some toast, and then I am going to hop in the shower and get the day started, shake of this lethargy, and try to get some shit done. Getting organized is a part of that process, and the book purge is also going to continue this weekend as well.

Being a writer is so soul-destroying sometimes. I am always amazed at writers who are confident always, and I sometimes wonder if that confidence masks insecurity. I’ve described writing as a bi-polar thing; you have to think you have talent even though you doubt you have any constantly, and it seems as though everything in the world is set up to tell you that you don’t. I’ve written and published over thirty books; I think it’s thirty-three at last count, and lots of short stories, book reviews, essays, etc., and yet somehow I still doubt myself all the time.

I often stop at times and think, “Well, this is why writers drink and commit suicide.”

We started watching American Gods last night, and it’s production values are spectacular. Ricky Whittle, who plays Shadow (and whom I know from The 100), is really amazing in the part. (I wasn’t sure, based on The 100, that he had the acting chops to pull off the lead in another series, and am very pleased to say that I was wrong.) The first episode was kind of slow–Paul wasn’t enrapt–but I do remember loving the novel when I read it a long time ago, so we’re going to stick with it; I’m sure it picks up steam after the initial set up.

And on that note, I need to get going.

Here’s a shot of Ricky Whittle to keep you going.

Ricky-Whittle